college clip: vegan dinner party in an on-campus kitchen

Asparagus Pizza

If you’re coming from my YouTube channel, welcome! If not, check out my video that goes along with this post:

One of my goals for my second semester at college was to host a small dinner party for some of my friends. Although I cooked a lot in my dorm room (videos and blog posts about this linked down below), I was always itching to cook in a real kitchen. I also love cooking for other people, so a dinner party seemed like the perfect idea.

My friend Mia has a kitchen access at her dorm, the same place where we made cookies and pizza, so that’s where the gathering happened.

I began by planning a menu. I decided I wanted to use as many seasonal and local ingredients as I could, so I based all of my recipes around local ingredients that would be available at that time (early May), such as greens, asparagus, and the remains of last year’s root vegetable crop. Here is the Italian-inspired menu I decided on:

Cook for 20-35 min (depending on the size of your pieces) until a knife can be inserted fairly easily into all of the vegetables (you could also just taste it).

Serve as is and enjoy.

Mushroom Lentil Loaf

After planning the menu and testing a couple of the recipes, I set the date: Tuesday May 2nd. It was during finals week, but I knew it would be no problem since I only had one final on Monday and a paper due Wednesday, which I could have mostly completed before Tuesday.

Then came the concussion. The Thursday before the dinner party, I fell, supposedly hit my head (I have no memory of this, but the doctors say it must have happened), and somehow got a concussion. Of course, typical me decided to put off going to the doctor, power through finals, and go through with the dinner party which I had put so much time into planning.

Things never go as planned. Having just had a concussion and being the physical and emotional wreck that comes with having a concussion, the dinner party was a massive struggle for me. Headache. Instead of biking to the kitchen, I ended up taking Uber because I knew I couldn’t make it on bike. Motion sickness. Then, the kitchen we wanted to use (the one with all the nice stuff – stand mixer, loaf pans, mixing bowls, plates, silverware, etc.), was being used for another event, and we had to use other one which did not have all those nice things. Looming anxiety. And finally, all the confusion about getting there, which kitchen we could use, and how I was going to get a few last minute ingredients pushed everything back about two hours, and there was no way I could cook all that food with so little time – my friends had finals the next morning! Helplessness.

Thankfully, my friends helped me out. I had wanted to do all the cooking and cleaning myself to give my friends a nice relaxing time, but my concussion-induced overdrive was not helping anyone. So, my friend Adam did a lot of the cooking alongside me, and everyone helped me clean up. Although it wasn’t the evening I was expecting, all the food got made and eaten, and we still had a good time. If/when I host another dinner party, I think I’ll be a little less ambitious with the menu, and plan for the unexpected.

Asparagus Pizza

If you are looking for more information on dorm room cooking, check out these three blog posts – 1, 2, 3 – or head over to my YouTube channel where I have several dorm room recipe videos. My Instagram @littleplantperson is also full of quick dorm room recipe ideas and cooking tips. More posts and videos on this subject are coming soon, so stay tuned!